Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany

THE CRISIS OF COMMUNISM

AND THE END OF EAST GERMANY

Charles S. Maier

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Fourth printing, and first paperback printing, 1999

Paperback ISBN 0-691-00746-2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Maier, Charles S.

Dissolution : The crisis of Communism and the end of

East Germany / Charles S. Maier.

p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-07879-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Germany (East)—Politics and government—1989-1990.

2. Communism—Germany (East). 3. Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.

4. Germany—History—Unification, 1990. 5. Opposition (Political science)—

Germany (East). I. Title.

DD289.M34   1997   943.1087′8—dc21   96-39995

http://pup.princeton.edu

ISBN-13: 978-0-691-00746-5 (pbk.)

eISBN: 978-1-400-82225-6

R0

FOR PAULINE

No great historical event is better calculated . . . to teach political writers and statesmen to be cautious in their speculations; for never was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen. . . . Was the phenomenon in fact so extraordinary as contemporaries supposed? . . . What was its true significance, its real nature, and what were the permanent effects of this strange and terrifying revolution? What exactly did it destroy, and what did it create? I believe that the time has come when these questions can be answered; that today we are in a position to see this memorable event in its true perspective and pass judgment on it. For we now are far enough from the Revolution to be relatively unaffected by the frenzied enthusiasm of those who saw it through; yet near enough to be able to enter into the feelings of its promoters and to see what they were aiming at. Soon it will be difficult to do this; since when great revolutions are successful their causes cease to exist and the very fact of their success has made them incomprehensible.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

Contents

Preface  xi

Preface

THIS book addresses one of the great transformations of our century, the sudden and unexpected fall of communism as a ruling system. As Tocqueville wrote about the French events of 1789, whose bicentennial was being celebrated even as the story told here gathered momentum, rarely was an upheaval so unforeseen. We cannot say so confidently that it was inevitable. Not because it was not, but because at best historians can circumscribe the inquiry into inevitability (What exactly was inevitable? After what date?); they cannot resolve it. Certainly in retrospect there were powerful causes militating for the radical transformation of state socialism. But to what precise degree it must dissolve, by what process it must be transformed, was not foreordained.

This indeterminacy was certainly the case for East Germany. By the late 1980s many observers held it to be a Communist success story. That it could have remained a stalwart Marxist-Leninist state, however, once the process of perestroika was under way in the Soviet Union seems almost impossible. Still, its collapse could have been less clamorous; it might conceivably have preserved at least a temporary lease on life as a reformed constituent of a German confederation. I do not propose that this would have been a more desirable outcome, only that, as we look back at the remarkable events of 1989–90, we can at best ascribe powerful causes for the disintegration of German communism, but no ineluctable reason that predetermined today’s united Germany, and certainly not so rapidly.

This book is thus the history not only of how a governing system disintegrated, but of how a particular Communist state disappeared. Like the Berlin Wall, the German Democratic Republic has now vanished. Its remains are ever more difficult to recapture. For the traveler, the concrete barrier and its graffiti, the watchtowers, lethal border strip, and crossing points that formed the frontier of the socialist world have now become just a vague winding strip of turf beneath the creaky Berlin elevated railroad or running along the curves of the Spree. Soon even that strip will be effaced by new construction. The back streets of provincial towns are still run down, industries have shut, Russian barracks are empty and desolate; the apartment blocks constructed in the past four decades remain bleak. But electronics stores and cafés now line village streets; vast merchandise outlets have been constructed near the Saxon Autobahn. The architectural legacy of past centuries—the brick cathedrals of the Altmark and Mecklenburg and the fretwork houses of Görlitz or Tangermünde, neoclassical villas, even some of the gutted synagogues—now reemerge, authentically revived, sometimes in that never-never land of expectant tourism. The DDR: Germany’s Disneyland, I have seen scrawled on one wall. The history of the interim yesterday needs to be written before preservation of the remoter past takes over.

The twin aspirations of this project—accounting for the crisis of communism and narrating the end of East Germany—have entailed different historiographical agendas. I wanted first just to convey the drama of historic transformation. The popular challenge to a regime that ruled oppressively for so long was, I felt then and still believe now, a great and heartening event. The participants who made their history in 1989 deserved an account that captured the energies, hopes, and anxieties at stake. Whether I have succeeded in this narrative task is up to the reader to decide, but it has remained an objective throughout. At the same time, to account for the collapse of communism—certainly the greatest European political development since the end of the Second World War—has required analyzing elements common to the Soviet bloc as a whole, including its systemic economic crisis, the rulers’ loss of conviction, the brief heyday of forum democracy, and the international diplomatic framework. Although this is not a work of systematic comparison, I hope that it will encourage readers to think about the former Communist countries as a group. It may also prod some insights about how Western societies function with respect to those in Eastern Europe.

Most centrally, though, this book endeavors to describe the disappearance of a very particular society with a complicated history: small, regimented, seemingly industrious, one of two heirs to a rich, even oppressive cultural legacy. I have had to recover the vanished German Democratic Republic in an almost archaeological way. In many respects it was a repressive little state built on public self-congratulations and pervasive policing. During the years that I passed through the country, from the early 1960s on, I found it a shabby and sad experience. There was truculence and pettifogging at the frontiers, an overweaning security apparatus within, a dismaying love for great asphalt spaces, the inculcation of fear as a tool of governance, the continuing celebration of mediocre achievements at home and of like-minded authoritarian regimes abroad, the constant projection of militarist and revanchist threats from the West. On the other hand, some people of good conscience sought to give their East German fatherland a good-faith effort. It incorporated for them some generous if deformed aspirations. It is easy enough to say they were proved wrong, but the task is to understand why they lent their efforts to the enterprise.

For all the loyalties and life histories accumulated in forty postwar years, there was always an elusive element to East Germany. At the very beginning of the 1960s, the displaced writer Uwe Johnson sought to come to grips with his foresaken homeland in a novel called The Third Book about Achim. Achim, an athlete and a hero of the German Democratic Republic, turns out to be curiously insubstantial, less his own man than a creation of his socialist society, courteous but spectral. The persons are invented, Johnson conceded. The events don’t relate to similar ones, but to the boundary, the difference, the remoteness, and the attempt to describe them. The events analyzed in this history are not invented, but my book too relates to the boundary, the difference, the remoteness, and the attempt to describe them. It seeks to evoke a society whose public institutions were totally disappearing even as all its inhabitants continued their individual lives.

German and American colleagues, familiar with the many monographs on the end of the GDR, on Communist societies, on the economic inefficiency of socialism, on democratic transitions, on dissident intellectuals, have often asked what new thesis or focus would distinguish my contribution. I felt naive confessing that I aspired to write a synthetic history rather than advance a particular approach. My chapters, of course, do embed new argumentation within their narratives: in the first I seek to cast a new light on the difficult issues of legitimacy and consent, of the nature of private and public spheres under late communism. In the second, I propose a reconstruction of Communist economic difficulties that is different in part from what other writers have provided. In the third chapter I analyze contending discourses of protest along lines that I have not encountered elsewhere. And throughout the work, I have, in fact, emphasized one major argument. It is that the East Germans, when they came to act collectively, had a decisive impact on their own history. This despite the low level of prior opposition and dissent.

West German colleagues have talked of an implosion of East Germany as if some worn-out machine finally just broke down. Some of them, who believed that the division of their country could never be overcome, now explain why the dissolution of East Germany was so logical and even inevitable. What I hope emerges from my account is that at each critical juncture, the East Germans’ collective action—no matter how hesitant at first, and how filled with doubts later—impelled decisive accommodations or allowed new initiatives. I am not claiming heroism; but I am defending agency. Before 1989, East Germans were not distinguished for their dissidence or resistance, and since unification some have shown what even sympathetic West Germans have described as a dismaying sense of inferiority: the feeling they need to be colonized. I do not want to romanticize the great demonstrations of 1989. Neither do I want to claim that episodic collective action implies a coherent collective actor. Michelet’s peuple remain too romantic a construction to be my kind of Volk. But by repeatedly managing to claim public space against the will of their regime, East German protesters provoked a crisis of governance and set in motion the greater powers around them. States and organized interest groups are not the only actors that matter. Urban squares remain the site of decisive contests.

Because a seemingly authoritarian and immobile system collapsed with such rapidity throughout Eastern Europe, the events treated in this book frankly disconcerted many social scientists and historians. Some claimed that the stunning surprises of 1989 proved that all history was characterized by events and ruptures (the stuff of Braudel’s histoire événementielle) and that sociopolitical trends or structures (the refractory patterns that persist over Braudel’s longue durée) were illusory. This was a hasty conclusion. Like fractals, historical sequences reveal both recurring patterns and infinite discontinuities at every level of scrutiny. Historians who focus on discontinuity usually emphasize elements of choice, spontaneity, and, most problematically, contingency. Others feel that to make sense of events, or just the actors’ perception of events, requires uncovering persisting societal pressures less affected by individual or even collective will. This account tries to combine both approaches.

Collective action, such as the mass protests in Leipzig and Berlin, can be celebrated for its spontaneity. Even more encouraging, it can be appreciated for the willingness of participants to act on beliefs and values that were long subject to state sanctions. The year 1989 helped revive the historian’s faith in the importance of choice—hence the need to represent commitment, action, and event. Political action, however, must simultaneously be understood as an outcome of continuing pressures. To analyze these long-term influences—economic impasses, corruption and privilege, the loss of confidence on the part of a ruling elite—is not to deny the strategic intervention of individuals or the dramatic impact of spontaneous mass demonstrations. But a reading of the events of 1989 still suggests (and not just in a trivial tautological sense) that political action in its own right first beckons and then certainly succeeds only when long-term conditions permit. Conversely, the same events reveal that political activity, at least if pursued with stamina and persistence, helps shape in turn the causal environment critical to its own success. The year 1989 confirms that historical analysis must rely continuously on working out this reciprocal interaction.

The drama of 1989 awoke many of us from a weary fixation with constraint. But it did not remove the historian’s need to present the web of institutions that structured choice. The longue or moyenne durée in which postwar communism was situated certainly needed a revised analysis, but as a category of historical explanation, it did not simply disappear. I have tried to organize this book to show how long-term pressures, on the one hand, and conscious choices, on the other, interacted precisely because the events of 1989 established so compelling a case for the power of both. Of course, people are always making choices. The East Germans who did not contest their condition before 1989 made choices as well. But we observers were privileged in 1989 to watch them make new and unexpected choices, to opt for self-determination and not further acquiescence. Speaking personally, since much of my work as a twentieth-century historian has involved examining the pressures that lead to choices for submission, it has been exhilarating to focus this time on choices for freedom.

When I began this project in the winter of 1989–90, I was uncertain whether a history was even possible for momentous events still unfolding. I took on the task because we historians do not often have the chance to witness the rapid transition from one regime to another and one international structure to a different one. For one who had followed the cold war, international relations, the European political economy, and the development of Germany as a professional concern for almost three decades, not to have applied the historian’s craft would have been a major renunciation. Moreover, history is always being written anew. The preoccupations that dictate questions change from one generation to the next. Source bases are in constant flux. A wider range of testimony continually opens up, even as some documentation (or human memories) is extinguished. No historian ever reaches a land that is forever firm. All history is provisional.

In the meantime, however, this history was able to become somewhat less provisional. I am confident that a serious if not a final history of the transformations in Germany is possible. Above all, the state and ruling party archives—and not just the controversial Stasi records, but transcripts of policy debates in the Politbüro and Central Committee, proposals from the Planning Commission and economic agencies, and other revealing correspondence—are available until the very end of the East German regime. Because of the pressure of the Bürgerbewegungen or citizens movements (the general term for those who took the protests of 1989 in hand), the archival authorities have not imposed the normal thirty-year rule that limits access to most government holdings elsewhere, including the preunification ministries of the former West Germany.¹ (This availability does not pertain to the records of the East German Foreign Ministry, whose records have been taken over by united Germany’s Foreign Office.) I have been among the early researchers, and in a few cases probably one of the very first, to work through many of these papers, which are still being reorganized.

Many sources have now been published. Members of the citizens movements and their successors (including the so-called Gauck authority for evaluating and making available the Ministry of State Security records) have published rich selections of documents. These include not merely the notorious reports on individuals but evaluations of social and economic conditions routinely submitted to the Politbüro. Hundreds of individual testimonies about the events of October and November 1989 have been collected and edited.

I have also drawn on personal observations and conversations during the period of transition. These discussions have, however, presented a particular hazard. Some inhabitants of the former GDR recalled their past socialist commitment with incisive self-criticism, some with abashed detachment, others with disorientation. Many, it was evident from conversation and writing, took refuge in the melancholy that the end of East Germany bequeathed. They tended to conflate their experience of their vanished republic with the bittersweet memories they endeavored or still endeavor to maintain. They constructed a history that in some cases nurtured their nostalgia. I have sought to convey that melancholy, which is important to grasp, without being captured by it. This is doubly important since I am trying to assess the troubled aftermath of unification in which these sentiments have played a critical role. I have also sought to go beyond subjectivity by analyzing economic processes, international transformations, and political interactions that destroyed the old system and thereafter brought about unification.

From the start of this project I have benefited from strategic assistance. I am happy to acknowledge a great debt to the staff of the Goethe Institute in Boston, our local branch of the Federal Republic’s major cultural centers abroad, for helping me follow a far wider range of coverage than I could do on my own during a crowded teaching year. I have been privileged to have a superb cohort of former and present students who kept intellectually abreast of the East German transformation. Anjana Shrivastava, now living in Berlin, assisted me early on in sorting through the press. Catherine Epstein has accumulated and shared a vast knowledge of who was who in the GDR. I have profited especially from continued dialogue with my former student John Connelly, now teaching at the University of California in Berkeley, who has shared his extraordinary comparative knowledge of East Germany and Eastern Europe. He regarded me as his teacher, but the relation was often reversed. Most recently, David Meskill helped me work through the final manuscript version, and Andrew Port provided invaluable scrutiny of the page proofs.

My own academic home in Cambridge, the Minda De Gunzburg Center for European Studies, has had a remarkable series of periodic seminars and reports on East European and German events and I have benefited from the stream of visitors. John Torpey, who was a James C. Conant postdoctoral fellowship holder at the Center during 1992–93, and Jeffrey Kopstein, a fellow in 1995–96, proved stimulating fellow researchers of the GDR. My long-term colleagues there—above all Abby Collins, Guido Goldman, and Stanley Hoffmann—have provided encouragement throughout. The Program for the Study of Germany and Europe, funded by the German government on the initiative of Chancellor Kohl and Werner Weidenfeld, has helped the Center to have conferences on the issues of economic reorganization, the role of women, and the reform of the university system. It also provided funding for two summer research trips. I have had opportunities to visit West and especially East Germany frequently since March 1990. In the early visits during March, July, and December 1990 and spring 1992, conversations with activists and academics were extremely useful, as were attendance at various public meetings such as the next-to-last Round Table discussions in East Berlin (facilitated by television correspondent Michael Schmitz), a church-sponsored evening with intellectuals, or meetings between church and economic leaders. Many intellectuals in East Germany who were leaders in criticizing the old system remain uneasy about what has emerged. I have not shared the depth of their misgivings, nor has the East German electorate. Nonetheless they are important as an intellectual current, and I have tried to take account of their assessments.

By 1993 the archives were beginning to open and have continued to make available more holdings, and I am grateful to the archivists at the former Deutsches Staatsarchiv in Potsdam (with special collections also dispersed elsewhere), which became a branch of the Bundesarchiv after 1990. I am also happy to acknowledge the friendly cooperation of the archivists of the Bundesarchiv Stiftung für die Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR, whose holdings originated with the former Institüt für Marxismus-Leninismus, were then reorganized as the PDS party archive in East Berlin, and have now been moved to WestBerlin quarters in Lichterfelde. Elena Danielson of the Hoover Institution facilitated my consultation by mail of some of the GDR oral history interviews that James McAdams has helped collect.

My work was immensely facilitated by collaboration with the Forschungsschwerpunkt Zeithistorische Studien in Potsdam, a research institute that includes West Germans and former members of the DDR Academy of Sciences. Jürgen Kocka, Christoph Kleßmann, and Konrad Jarausch have supervised this unique center, supported originally by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and now, as the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam, by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and state government of Brandenburg. I have had the chance for scholarly residence, participation in some of its conferences, and have served on its board of scholarly advisers. By virtue of long and friendly colleagueship Jarausch and Kocka have provided encouragement and insight.

I am happy to acknowledge numerous discussions with political activists (Jens Reich, Bärbel Bohley, Friedrich Schorlemmer, Richard Schröder, and others) and some political leaders, including the opportunity to hear Chancellor Kohl at the Center for European Studies, Lothar de Maizière during the March 1990 electoral campaign in East Berlin, and Kurt Biedenkopf in Saxony reflect frankly on the transformations under way. Egon Krenz offered some retrospective ruminations after we both put in our day at the archives. Colleagues and fellow historians at Berlin, Leipzig, and Potsdam have provided their insights. Where appropriate, specific discussions will be cited, but I am not documenting the interviews in their own right. As a scholar venturing into new territory I have drawn gratefully on the work of those who followed the regime and society far more closely and constantly than I have. Among those with whom I’ve been able to exchange ideas personally over the past years: Konrad Jarausch, Christiane Lemke, Norman Naimark, Lutz Niethammer, and Hartmut Zwahr. Other authorities whom I have read with special profit include Timothy Garton Ash, who has conveyed the aspirations of all those West and East who sought to knit together the halves of their continent in liberty, and, for the diplomatic aspects of unification, Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice. Mary Fulbrook’s wellinformed Anatomy of a Dictatorship appeared as I was revising my chapters; otherwise her expertise might have been acknowledged at many points. Many other helpful works are cited here. Too many friends, students, and colleagues have taken the trouble to read parts of this manuscript to name them all, but especially thoughtful comments were provided by Konrad Jarausch, Jürgen Kocka, Anne Sa’adah, professor of politics at Dartmouth and author of a forthcoming work on political justice since 1989, Philip Zelikow, and Pauline Maier. Walter Lippincott of Princeton University Press merits a final thanks, first for having proposed at the end of 1989 that I write a quick book on the upheaval under way and then for his patience as the work, I hope, deepened, but in any case slowed.

As my epilogue suggests, I think that for all its difficulties, the process of German unification has started to take. Economic restructuring has been costly and painful and will remain incomplete for a long time; the university system might have been reorganized more innovatively; establishing legal responsibility for past abuses has been especially agonizing. With respect to the mutual alienation that is still rife, it has been fashionable to talk about the wall in the head. But as of the mid-1990s, I believe that there is less obsessiveness about the juxtaposition of East and West; the unification agenda has evolved—Germans, to use the cliché, have moved on. Pollsters discover nostalgia for the old GDR, but no widespread desire to undo the results of 1990; and nostalgia is easy to indulge in when it is deprived of consequence. The relative success of the so-called Party of Democratic Socialism, the offspring of the Communist SED, rests on the grievances of displaced Ossies: the PDS is a vehicle for former cadres and those annoyed by the intrusive success of West Germans; it is not an ideological vanguard.

Social scientists, I have argued elsewhere, are not at fault for failing to predict the upheaval of 1989, but they should have foreseen that the economic and spiritual difficulties of exiting from communism would be profound and persistent.² Throughout Eastern Europe many disappointments have followed upon the uplifting experience of 1989: the civic movements have splintered; electorates have returned in part to old, slightly refurbished Communist leaders, and, most troublingly, there has been a resurgence of ethnic conflict and prejudice. Some similar trends have gripped Western countries as well. Nonetheless I still believe that what took place at the end of the 1980s was a wonderful series of events. As a citizen of the United States, I was proud then that the values which my country has represented—at least in its best moments—proved so contagious. Discovering anew, through East German and East European courage, the attractiveness of America’s own founding principles makes it appropriate to dedicate this book to my wife, Pauline, who has continually studied their emergence as well as the forms of early American political protest. It is especially fitting since through her historical research I have learned about the formation of those liberating ideas which proved so powerful in 1989 and will hopefully retain their attraction.

Cambridge, February 1996

¹ Throughout this book I use GDR (German Democratic Republic) and East Germany as equivalent terms; citations to original sources often use DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik). The new Bundesländer refers to the former East Germany, now part of united Germany. I use the English abbreviation FRG, or West Germany, or Bundesrepublik, for the preunification Federal Republic of Germany, with its capital in Bonn. And I refer simply to Germany or united Germany—now sometimes called the Berlin Republic—for the postunification state, which remains officially the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland).

² Charles S. Maier, Wissenschaft und Wende. Grenze der Prognosefähigkeit, lecture to the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft, Potsdam, August 1994, now published in the volume of proceedings: Einigung und Zerfall. Deutschland und Europa nach dem Ende des Ost-West-Konfliktes. 19. Wissenschaftlicher Kongreß der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft, ed. Gerhard Lehmbruch (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1995), pp. 315–325.

Losing Faith

LANCELOT: It is all very difficult, Kay. When one chases after an idea for years and years, without getting the tiniest step closer, it’s very depressing. Each of us has only a brief life to dispose of, and each of us puts too many hopes in this vulnerable and all-too-quickly extinguished life. More than it can bear.

KAY: What do you mean by that, Lancelot? Do you still believe in the grail?

LANCELOT: I don’t know. I can’t answer the question. I can’t say yes or no. . . .

ARTHUR: Lancelot, Kay: be quiet. Everything that men create suddenly comes into question, everything, every idea, every invention, every human institution. What appears sure and certain is suddenly very doubtful. But that is frightening only for an instant and in fact it will help us to get further along. It is not only an end, it’s the beginning of something new; I foresaw it when I founded the realm. . . .

LANCELOT: Arthur, do you know that the people outside don’t want to hear any more about the grail and the round table? Before, they respected us. . . today they only laugh if they see a knight of the round table. . . . They no longer believe in our justice and our dream. . . . For the people the knights of the round table are a pile of fools, idiots and criminals. . . .

—Christoph Hein, The Knights of the Round Table

BELIEVERS AND VICTIMS

Hein’s play was written for production in early 1989, as the East German Politbüro buckled down to resist the winds of reform blowing through Eastern Europe. In Hein’s comedy of disillusion, Arthur’s aging knights include remaining true believers, exhausted former believers, the defector to Merveille, that is the Federal Republic—and, outside their circle, the son and heir for whom the king’s original faith was always irrevelant. Halfway through the play, the knights admit they may never find the grail. Still, Arthur endeavors to explain, it is not the grail but the quest that is essential: If we give up on the grail, we give up on ourselves. . . . We’ve lost the ground under our feet and we are in danger of sinking.

When did Arthur’s round table finally fall to pieces? After September 10, 1989, when the Hungarian Communist regime opened its border to Austria, thus allowing vacationing East Germans to make a detour into the West behind their own sealed frontier? On October 9, 1989, when Leipzig authorities refused to turn the factory militias and armored vehicles against the crowds? A month later, on November 9, the seventy-first anniversary of the revolution that brought down the Wilhelmian Empire, when the wall was opened, and hundreds of thousands streamed into West Berlin? In retrospect, the observer can point to earlier indications of inner transformation: mounting dependence on Western credits to prop up a vulnerable economy; an independent peace movement since the early 1980s; a growing space for careful dissent; the assurance from academics one met at conferences that they were abandoning the ritual texts of Marxism and exploring the new lines of inquiry being opened in the West; the reevaluation of a German national tradition; a radically disaffected samizdat poetry in Prenzlauer Berg, the raffish Greenwich Village quarter of East Berlin; an encroaching tone of disaffected irony in literature—all testifying to the erosion of socialist conviction, to Lancelot’s weariness and Arthur’s fecklessness, undermining what along with Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Albania was the last European bastion of the Marxist faith.

To whom had the grail originally beckoned? What mixture of belief and force had allowed the regime to function for four decades? Certainly it required the presence of Soviet occupiers. But the system depended on more than constraint. It was based on graduated levels of commitment or at least acceptance, which of course overlapped and were fluid: a tested, steely faith from those who formed the preexisting, old Communist core of the ruling party; enthusiasm and hope on the part of postwar cadres; active collaboration on the part of many others, either resigned and cynical or in good faith, within the party or in a tolerated public organization; and finally acquiescence from the rest.

First on the morrow of the Second World War, thereafter at each moment when more demanding compliance was imposed, there were always non-Communists who cooperated with those who ruled the state. Why? Some were demoralized by twelve years of National Socialist brutality and did not believe they really had a choice. Some convinced themselves that the West German alternative remained a class society riddled with social injustice and was controlled by those who had worked hand in hand with the Nazis. Some consoled themselves with the persistent illusion that from within the multiparty block, or even within the dominant Socialist Unity Party (SED), they might push for reforms. The incantory reassurance of antifascism and peace, the self-importance generated by being recruited to sign an open letter or contribute a credo, the glow of virtuous companionship aroused at mass meetings, the discovery that an appropriate citation from Lenin got one’s articles circulated—all worked for an ambience of collaboration. Later those who thus paid their dues might point to the accomplishments of socialism: expropriation of Junker estates, reconstruction, or broader access to education. Establishing the postwar Communist world certainly required Soviet force, but until the myth lost the last shreds of its sustaining force in the 1980s, it also rested on the capacity for rationalization. Nothing is more inexplicable than an enthusiasm that has disappeared, the journalist Carola Stern has written in a dual memoir of her own National Socialist adolescence and the Communist resistance activities of her later companion, Heinz Zöger:

She too belonged to those children of the twentieth century, who, having come of age in the middle of the totalitarian movements of its first half, seduced by ideologies and ideologues, came to thirst for belief; who having been weaned from their own thinking allowed others to think and decide for them. Children—carried away by frightful and beautiful plans for transforming the world, aware of themselves as belonging to an elite and simultaneously fascinated by being part of a community, a member of a collectivity. Encased humans, deprived by a mesh of dogma and rigid structures, cynical or helpless and desperate. Such children of the century will need the rest of their lives to work through their childhood.¹

Before condemning those who in the devastated cities of East Germany wagered on making the best of a difficult situation, we should recall the Western intellectuals who convinced themselves into supporting the same politics with far fewer external pressures. Nor were opportunism and poor judgment the only persuaders in the East. Periodic purges played their part. Unless they are caught up before a judge or investigating committee, Americans forget how destructive of ego, how designed to abase and unnerve, can be the inquisitorial experience. The humiliation of being dressed down and ostracized by former friends and colleagues; the demands for a cringing self-criticism of a stance that once was held with righteous passion; dismissal from jobs or honorific positions; outright prosecution as a betrayer of party and state—all the resources of political conformity were available to discipline any faltering of the faith. Do you not realize, so the East Berlin SED secretary for culture would lash out at protesters against the expulsion of dissident Wolf Biermann, as late as 1976, that your attitude was politically wrong and has harmed everything that you should hold dear and beloved? . . . Do you still maintain that other values are higher than party discipline? Let the dissenter recant or exclude himself!² The threat of denunciation by the party hack inserted into one’s editorial board or faculty department or professional union, the party’s control of travel opportunities or the education available for oneself or children, reinforced acquiescence, if not enthusiasm.

Occasionally a critical voice would express sardonic amazement at how repressive the whole system quickly became. Bertolt Brecht, who had chosen to return to East Germany, mocked the regime for losing confidence in its people after the uprising of June 17, 1953. (At the same time he wrote privately to his friend, Minister for Culture Johannes R. Becher, to condemn the demonstrators.) Twenty-three years later Reiner Kunze’s The Fabulous Years conveyed the petty absurdities and search for conformity with a collection of revealing anecdotes. They resulted in his expulsion from the Writers’ League.³ The fact that those subject to such discipline could always see their kin and former compatriots, co-heirs of a common culture and language living rich and free next door, only made the system more galling. I remember an East German friend—a historian, not made for outright defiance, but never able to kow-tow sufficiently for real promotion—telling me before East Berlin’s Red City Hall (named for its brick, not its politics) in the mid-1970s, when West German students were still contesting the supposed repressiveness of the Bonn regime: If they had to live here, they would walk on their knees to get to West Berlin. By the end only the East German leadership persisted in affirming the ideology gone stale; and the Soviet authorities who had sustained them in power found them tiresome.

In the beginning there had been rubble and the first stirrings of scattered opponents of Nazism emerging from an enforced silence, released from concentration camps, or returning from refuges abroad. They included the religiously motivated, former trade unionists, conservative civil servants—and Communists. Even before Hitler came to power, it had required (so members saw it) unremitting discipline to persevere as a Communist. To participate at the cutting edge of history demanded subjection to the party’s historically achieved insights. It required understanding that social democracy was a betrayal of class interest as retrograde as fascist thuggery; it meant realizing that Stalin’s position let him see with more acute penetration than any other political leader. These tenacious beliefs had given hundreds the courage to maintain a fragmented clandestine resistance for several years after Hitler quickly outlawed their party and arrested their leaders. Some survived the brutality of concentration camps or, like the young Erich Honecker, spent oppressive years in Brandenburg, Plötzensee, and other prisons where guillotining became routine. There were émigrés returning from sojourns in New York or Mexico. Finally, there was the phalanx of German Communists suddenly flown home from their long years in Soviet exile. They had been hermetically sealed in the corridors of Moscow’s Hotel Lux, had survived the lethal twists and turns of Stalin’s purges, and understood the prewar and wartime agonies of the vast country he ruled only from whispers and stilted coversations. They were almost taken aback that now under Russian military supervision the moment had come to transform German society.⁴

Some local Social Democrats and Communists in East and West Germany—their feuds suspended by common persecution—exploited the brief weeks of the Nazi collapse to establish Antifa committees to manage factories, administer towns, and organize social services. Their wildcat local socialism offended each of the occupying powers, who quickly dissolved them.⁵ Despite other differences, the Allied leaders and their proconsuls agreed on an orderly dismantling of the Reich, close supervision of the resumption of political life, and a distrust of independent initiatives as harbingers of nationalist revival. Among the non-Nazi political spokesmen acceptable to the occupying authorities (in this respect the four powers were in agreement) were Social Democrats, former Catholic Center leaders, and the Weimar liberals whose parties had collapsed so disastrously by the end of the 1920s. Communists had few indigenous roots in the United States zone of occupation, and although they might have prospered in the industrial regions assigned to the British, London’s military and civilian authorities deeply distrusted them and encouraged their Social Democratic rivals. That left them under Russian sponsorship in the eastern zone and in Berlin where power was shared.

After the German surrender, Soviet policy (like that of the United States) remained in some flux through 1945, the top leadership uncertain about the rewards for interallied cooperation, unresolved about the risks of imposing outright domination over its own zone. As in the West, a welter of authorities contended for influence in German affairs: the Foreign Ministry, the Council of Ministers special committee on Germany and its plenipotentiaries in Germany, the military, and the occupation forces. Several priorities would remain central. A recovered Germany must not be able to gang up with the Western powers in any anti-Soviet alignment. There must be final, not just provisional four-power acceptance of the Oder-Neisse frontier between Germany and Poland. Economic objectives must be secured: in the short term, exploit the productive resources of Germany through factory removals, over the long run win a reparations agreement that secured continuing industrial and raw material deliveries—including the Wismut uranium ore from the Erzgebirge or Ore Mountains.⁶

How these objectives were to be attained over the long haul was subject to debate and strategic modification. Soviet policy at the Potsdam Conference envisaged the eventual reemergence of a unified but hopefully compliant Germany. Through 1947 and 1948 Soviet objectives remained complex but consistent. It was doubtful that the British and Americans would allow outright Communist control of the whole country; but a recovered Germany must never join an anti-Soviet coalition or challenge the Oder-Neisse frontier settlement. Communist Party participation in a governing coalition would guarantee this cooperation just as the Soviets hoped that party collaboration in the French and Italian postwar governments would keep these states from any anti-Soviet alignment. Indeed, if the Allies did not back down on their commitment to reestablish a united centralized government, Soviet pressure might even wrest a more preponderant role for its German Communists, much as Moscow increasingly strove for from 1945 through 1947–48 in all the countries of Eastern Europe.⁷

But there was a basic contradiction inherent in Moscow’s policies. Soviet control of Eastern Germany was supposed to be the bargaining chip that secured their clients’ voice in reunited Germany. Instead Soviet control became so oppressive that by 1947 it dissuaded the West from unification on terms the Russians were offering. With an eye toward a Communist leverage throughout the country as a whole, the Soviet occupying authorities worked to construct in the territory they controlled a single party front that grouped all the non-Nazi groups with a key role for the German Communists. But this very policy soon confirmed Anglo-American distrust of Russian intentions and led the Western powers to insist on a decentralized all-German government and ultimately to reject the Soviet terms for unifying a German administration.⁸

The key to Soviet formation of a single party front was absorption of the East German Social Democrats. The old SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) had resisted Hitler courageously, even though its economic policies during the Depression had remained unimaginative and its leadership preoccupied by organizational concerns. All four victorious powers recognized that the SPD had a moral right to a share of postwar leadership. But would the SPD cooperate with the Communists, who during the crisis of Weimar had bitterly denounced the reformist party? In Western Germany, where the Communists were feeble and the Allies distrusted them as well, the Social Democratic answer was clearly no. But in the Soviet zone, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, where all organizational rights depended on the approval of Russian military authorities, the balance of power was reversed.

By February 1946, Berlin SPD leader Otto Grotewohl decided that he had to accede to the pressure from Soviets and Communists and take his rank and file into a new unified Marxist coalition, the Sozialistische Einheits-partei or SED, which was to become the ruling party until the end of 1989. An iron curtain had descended for good over the Soviet zone, Grotewohl explained to British officials in Berlin; there were no choices left.⁹ Was his distress genuine? His speeches in the aftermath of fusion were devoid of any distance: he became an enthusiastic spokesman for Marxist reunification, celebrated Soviet policy, and was elevated as head of government when the GDR was granted national status in 1949. The new SED grouped the ideologically determined Communists and those Social Democrats who either cynically accepted their subordination or hoped at least to preserve some freedom of action and keep options open from within. After all, Hitler had come to power—so the European Left believed after 1933 through the early postwar years—precisely because the two great currents of Marxism had quarreled between themselves. The political unity of the working class imposed itself as a commandment.¹⁰

For Russian officials, who had survived first the cruel and capricious tests of Stalinist purges and then participated in a massive war effort, security in Germany could only mean control. If Communists were a minority, then their political resources must be leveraged. The new SED was a marvelous instrument for this end, and it in turn dominated a unity front of antifascist-democratic parties—Liberal Democrats, Christian Democrats, Peasants’ League, and the National Democratic Party of Germany—whose cooperation with the SED as the so-called block parties would endure until December 1989. The original goal of the SED and its Soviet sponsors, however, was not merely to rule a separate German state. They aspired at least to parity if not preponderance within a unified Germany. By 1947, however, the impetus of the cold war conflict (in good part arising out of the very policies of communization in Poland, Romania, and Hungary!) made agreement on a single German state ever more remote. Mutual recriminations over the progressive breakdown of the complicated reparations arrangements also seemed unbridgeable. Neither side was willing finally to make the accommodations demanded by the other at the Moscow Foreign Ministers Conference in April 1947.With the announcement of the Marshall Plan six weeks later, and the exclusion of the Communists from postwar coalitions in Belgium, France, and Italy during these very months, jockeying over the German future also became intense.

In Western Germany a British-American bizonal economic organization placed Germans in administrative positions and provided for an embryonic parliament. Reconstruction of government within nine western federal states enlarged the role of the postwar parties: the independent SPD of the Western zones, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the smaller Liberal Democrats (who in the West became the Free Democratic Party), and other political fragments, some nationalist, some refugee oriented. In the Soviet zone, consolidation of the ruling party and construction of a new East German regime would procede in tandem. Within the SED, the Communist nuclei, led by Moscow trainees and reinforced by the factory cells that had struggled to continue clandestine work during the Third Reich, quickly subordinated the Social Democrats who had been persuaded to join. The wider block of collaborating parties was also brought to heel, as they were pressured to oust conservative and nationalist members who urged more independence from the Soviet Union or who objected to final recognition of the Oder-Neisse border. As late as October 1989, however, representatives of the smaller parties still defended their long collaboration with the SED, for reasons of history, as the Liberal Democratic leader said, and from knowledge of the general laws of development of human society.¹¹

Despite their subjection of independent political currents in the late 1940s, the Soviets’ goals seem to have remained unresolved through most of 1947. Major differences still existed within the Moscow leadership over how to respond to increasing anticommunism in the West. During 1947, German representatives in all the occupied zones still had to learn that unification was not to take place. West German and East German CDU organizations worked together and hoped for a national representation but found their proposals vetoed by the Allied Control Council. In October, West European Communist leaders were instructed by the Soviets that in light of the recent Marshall Plan initiatives and the exclusion of Communists from Western coalitions, a new era of confrontation with capitalism was at hand. The Soviets established a new Cominform to coordinate Communist parties East and West and to replace the earlier Comintern, which had been dissolved to facilitate the wartime coalition.

Moscow, however, did not immediately foreclose all alternative policies for Germany: a new Foreign Ministers Conference was to convene on Germany at London in late 1947; the SED was not yet enrolled as a Cominform party. Ostensibly to petition the four powers, the SED organized a massive Volkskongress in early December on behalf of unity and a just peace. More than a quarter of the two thousand delegates traveled from the West, only to return disillusioned by the blatant pressure to endorse the block policies of the East. For Jacob Kaiser, Berlin trade-union leader of the Christian Democrats, the Congress was rigged, and it signaled the end of any autonomous CDU in the East. The staged convention called for national unity even as the London Foreign Ministers Conference confirmed the rupture among the four allies over the German issue. The Western powers prohibited the movement on behalf of the People’s Congress from continuing in their zones, but as a would-be national forum and a propaganda device in the East, the institution served Soviet purposes. Developments in the Soviet zone might in fact preclude interallied agreement, but the Congress meanwhile claimed to be a popular movement that wanted with Soviet sponsorship to recreate national unity from the base up. A second People’s Congress in March 1948 revealed an even more dominant SED presence, and now moved to elect a German People’s Council, of whom one-third still claimed to represent the West.

This new Volksrat again urged German unification even as the Western allies were preparing the currency reform of June 1948, and the hitherto recalcitrant French joined their zone with the British and Americans. In response to the Western initiatives, the Soviet delegate had walked out of the Allied Control Commission in March: there was to be no further effort at unified administration. Currency reform in June, the Russians’ blockade of land routes to West Berlin, and the drafting of a constitution for the Western zones under the auspices of the British, French, and Americans followed in rapid succession.

As Allied authorities and Land representatives moved to establish a provisional West German state, the East German SED continued to impose the Cominform model of Communist control. The emerging pattern included central economic planning, a people’s democracy with its suppression of effective opposition, and, by 1950, the molding of adherents in factories or ministries or faculties into a party of a new type. Stalin’s ideological bulldog, Andrei Zhdanov, had laid down the law in September 1947, and in February 1948, the Communists took control of the Czech government from a tolerant, alas at times ingenuous coalition regime. The seizure of power in Prague and Washington’s now decisive responses in terms of foreign aid and West German rehabilitation effectively consolidated the division of Europe into two spheres. Still, it was Marshall Tito’s rejection of Soviet control over his undoubtedly Communist state later in 1948 that catalyzed an even more ruthless repression throughout Eastern Europe. Dissent among Communists always represented the most devious conspiratorial challenge in Stalin’s eyes. His dark suspicions could only be echoed by henchmen such as Zhdanov, Molotov, and Beria, who had achieved their prominence by faithful loyalty during the frightful purges and wartime reverses. Tito’s challenge unleashed a convulsive series of denunciations, party purges, and rigged trials. Although the SED was not yet a Cominform party, German Communists responded to the encroaching demands for conformity. At the SED executive’s session of September 1948, convened as the Yugoslav insurrection was intensifying, SED leaders shelved their earlier concept of a specific German road to socialism. The Leninist and Stalinist model of Communist transformation was henceforth to dictate the policies and organization of the Socialist Unity Party. Grotewohl himself demanded so unambiguous and unreserved an orientation to the East that Stalin allegedly told him to slow down: you German communists, like your ancestors, are Teutons.¹² Nonetheless, Teutonic discipline tightened further. As a party of the new type the SED was to be controlled by its cadres; Stalin’s Short History of the CPSU and his interpretation of Leninism became the holy texts; the emphasis of organizational work switched to the factory where the Communists, not former Social Democrats, were strong. In subsequent meetings of the party executive (Vorstand), a Politbüro and a Zentralkomitee (ZK) were established to consolidate control. Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl remained joint chairmen, but the dour organizational adept, Walter Ulbricht, took over as general secretary of the ZK.¹³

For an interval in 1990, the former ZK building—drab and gray labyrinth originally constructed for the Reichsbank—served as the Parliamentarians’ House. It provided office space for the transitional, freely elected Volkskammer of the vanishing GDR, and is slated now to house the Foreign Ministry. Its facade faces obliquely across the vast Marx-Engels-Platz (for whose inspiring asphalt acreage the East Germans razed the baroque royal palace), to one of the most glorious remaining architectural legacies of Berlin: Schinkel’s neoclassical Old Museum. Even closer is Schinkel’s sober neo-Gothic Friedrichswerdsche Church, a testimonial to the loving restoration work that the regime found congenial for its historical claims by the 1970s and 1980s. Within the ZK’s parallel wings, long drab corridors with office after office testify (even after the portraits of Honecker were unceremoniously removed) to the mass of bureaucratic control that the apparatus eventually took in hand. Even from more compact quarters at the beginning of its long domination, the ZK supervised the transition to a satellite.

A satellite, but no longer merely a zone. With the establishment of a West German state in 1949, the Russians adopted the counterstrategy of giving statehood to their own area of control. The People’s Council, emanating from the Second People’s Congress, worked out a constitution. Soviet-style constitutions were always formally democratic, and the new East German charter incorporated many of the innovations that the West German Basic Law also featured, including limitations on no-confidence motions and restrictions on the office of president. But the electoral system ensured that the people’s choice would be safely controlled. Open, competitive elections for state and local offices had registered embarrassing results in the first postwar balloting in October 1946. Although the SED won 47.5 percent of the votes in the five safely controlled Länder of the Soviet zone, in the all-Berlin elections—held under interallied ground rules and featuring an independent SPD list—the Unity Party attracted only about a fifth of the votes. The system was amended for the Third People’s Congress in 1949, when a single list grouping the block parties and professional organizations was presented to the East German electorate. As in the other countries of East Europe, elections henceforth were to involve not a contest among party alternatives, but plebiscitary approval or rejection of a unified slate and perhaps an innocuous policy aspiration. It still required considerable effort for the SED in 1949 to convince two-thirds of the eligible voters to vote yes for peace and for the list of candidates presented. The electorate must have been delighted with the progress made when it voted again, in the fall of 1950, for the first regular Volkskammer elected under the new constitution. Allegedly 98.5 percent of the voters participated, and 99.7 percent of them voted for the single list. In theory the SED claimed only one-quarter of the Chamber for its own delegation. In fact it also controlled the 30 percent of the seats granted to its subservient mass organizations, including the Federation of German Trade Unions and the youth federation, and it dominated two new satellite parties (the National Democratic Party of Germany, NDPD, and the Democratic Peasants’ Party of Germany, DBD), who were